1. Field
This disclosure generally relates to automated or interactive monitoring and testing of wireless communications based mobile devices (hereinafter mobile devices), and more particularly to local and remote capturing and stimulation of mobile device output.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hardware manufactures or designers are releasing new mobile devices at a faster rate, with higher complexity, and with a wider variety of functionality across the mobile device offerings. Wireless communications service providers or carriers and data service providers (e.g., cellular communications service providers or carriers) typically provide a variety of mobile devices or services related to such mobile devices (e.g., smart phones) in a variety of locations, conditions and environments. Such variety, coupled with the increasing complexity and variety of mobile devices and the expanding input and output capabilities of such mobile devices, may lead to unforeseen or even undesirable behavior. Enabling hardware manufacturers and/or service providers (collectively, “clients”) to locally or remotely monitor and interactively test mobile devices may provide those clients with opportunities to identify and reproduce such behavior, for instance aberrant behavior.
As one example, suppose that a client (e.g., mobile device manufacturer or designer or wireless communications service provider) has received multiple complaints from end users of particular mobile devices provided by the client. These complaints may be related to undesirable behavior in the form of audio interference produced by the mobile device when using a particular application on the mobile device. Such complaints may have been provided by end users of a variety of different mobile devices under a variety of circumstances, such as by end users of multiple models of the device provider's mobile devices using one or more versions of a particular operating system. The undesirable behavior may be difficult to intentionally reproduce, let alone do so in a manner that allows the client or other interested entity to determine a cause of the undesirable behavior. Capturing all output of one or more representative mobile devices, while monitoring user input to the devices or even reproducing user-reported actions to attempt to reproduce the undesirable behavior, may be useful to a number of different entities—to the mobile device manufacturer or designer; to a wireless service provider of the end user; to a provider of the application that is reportedly in use when the undesirable audio interference occurs; to end users of the mobile device; or other entity. Additionally, the ability to remotely perform such monitored interactions with the mobile device may provide improved results, by allowing those results to be obtained for multiple mobile devices in a variety of locations, conditions and environments (such as those that may resemble those in which the undesirable behavior was observed) while allowing a client interested in such results to remain in a single preferred location.
As another example, an application developer interested in releasing an application for use with a particular mobile device or multiple such mobile devices may find that testing the application on a large number of mobile devices in a thorough manner requires significant resources, such as an investment in acquiring the multiple mobile devices and a substantial amount of human labor and time to interact with the application on each of those multiple mobile devices. Furthermore, without being enabled to monitor and/or capture each of the multiple input and output capabilities of each mobile device on which the application is being tested, the developer may be unable to determine particular aspects of the mobile device and its operations with respect to the tested application. For such purposes and others, it may be useful to provide a mobile device with a predefined sequence of input actions in order to examine the resulting output of that mobile device (for example, to ensure that such output matches the behavior desired and/or expected by the application developer). In certain circumstances, providing interactive user actions to a monitored mobile device, either independently or in conjunction with one or more predefined sequences of input actions, may allow an application developer or other interested entity to gain insight into mobile device behavior that would otherwise be more difficult to obtain.
New approaches are therefore desirable that automate various activities related to the monitoring of mobile devices while allowing for simultaneous local or remote operation and the use of predefined input sequences, partially predefined input sequences and/or interactive testing.